Leonard Katz (1938-2017) was an American experimental psychologist, born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a Professor of Psychology at the University of Connecticut from 1994 and Professor Emeritus until 2017. He was a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories from 1974 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Psychological Science. In the late 1960s, he applied the emerging concepts and experimental techniques of the new cognitive psychology to study children’s reading. In 1974 he joined Haskins Laboratories, where he collaborated with Isabelle Liberman, Donald Shankweiler, and others in the Haskins program that studied the relationships between speech and reading, particularly the idea that phonological awareness of speech is instrumental in developing skilled reading. His early work studied the cognitive processes involved in reading English but soon was extended to include studies of reading in other alphabetic writing systems (French, Spanish, Turkish, Russian, Serbian, Hebrew, Korean) and a nonalphabetic system (Chinese). With Ram Frost, he developed the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis (ODH) to explain printed word reading. The ODH accounted for the cognitive processing balance between letter decoding and the processing of larger text clusters as a function of the degree of isomorphism between a writing system’s letters and phonemes.

By the 1990s, he was a member of teams (led by Bennett and Sally Shaywitz at Yale and Ken Pugh at Yale and Haskins) that utilized brain-scan data from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI), and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to study reading. That work, together with the work of many other researchers, established the outlines of the brain’s mechanisms involved in processing printed words. In addition to his research activity, he was a resource consultant at UConn, Haskins, and various governmental and private research projects on issues of experimental design and statistical analysis.

Education

B.S. 1959 University of Massachusetts/Amherst

Ph.D.1963 University of Massachusetts/Amherst

Experience

1963-65 Post-Doctoral Fellow, Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences, Stanford University

1965 Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut

1968 Associate Professor, University of Connecticut

1971 Sabbatical leave, Sussex University, England

1974- Professor, University of Connecticut

1977- Research Scientist, Reading Research Group, Haskins Laboratories and Yale University

1979 Sabbatical leave, Sussex University, England

1986 Fulbright Fellow, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia

1987- 2000 Investigator, Dyslexia Research Group, Department of Pediatrics, Yale Medical School

1993-2003 Statistical consultant, Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services

1994 Sabbatical leave, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

1994 Visiting Research Fellow, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey

1998-2005 Statistical consultant, Department of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York

2006 Professor Emeritus

2010 Member of International Committee of Project Evaluation for Reading Research, InstitutoABCD, Sao Paulo, Brazil

2012-Editorial Advisor, Reading Psychology

2012-Editorial Advisor, Annals of Dyslexia

2014-2016 Board member, Haskins Laboratories

Selected Publications

Katz, L., & Wicklund, D. A. (1971). Word scanning rate for good and poor readers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 62, 138–140.

Katz, L., & Feldman, L. B. (1981). Linguistic coding in word recognition: Comparisons between a deep and a shallow orthography. In A. Lesgold & C. Perfetti, Interactive Processes in reading. Hillsdale. NJ: Erlbaum.

Katz, L. & Frost, R. (1992). The reading process is different for different orthographies: The orthographic depth hypothesis. In Frost, R. & Katz, L., (Eds.). Orthography, Phonology, Morphology, and Meaning, pp. 67–84. Amsterdam: Elsevier North Holland Press.

Katz, L. (2005). Dyslexia. In Philipp Skutch (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Linguistics. New York: Routledge,. 2 volumes. (ISBN 1-57958-391-1.)

Katz, L., Lee, C.H., Tabor, W., Frost, S. J., Mencl, W. E., Sandak, R., Rueckl, J., & Pugh, K. R. (2005). Behavioral and Neurobiological Effects of Printed Word Repetition in Lexical Decision and Naming. Neuropsychologia. 43, 2068–2083.

Katz, L. (2011). The neurobiology of reading and writing. In P. C. Hogan (Ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, 932–934. New York: The Cambridge University Press.

Katz, L., Brancazio, L., Irwin, J., Katz, S., Magnuson, J., & Whalen, D. (2012). What lexical decision and naming tell us about reading. Reading and Writing, 25, 1259–1282. doi:10.1007/s11145-011-9316-9 PMC 3383646

Braze, D., Katz, L., Magnuson, J. S., Mencl, W. E., Tabor, W., Van Dyke, J. A., Gong, T., Johns, C. L., & Shankweiler, D. P. (2016). Vocabulary does not complicate the Simple View of Reading. Reading and Writing, 29(3), 435–451. DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9608-6

Junghye Jeong, Leonard Katz and Yang Lee (2018). The two-dimensional orthography of phonology and morphology in differentiating Korean and Chinese, Writing Systems Research.

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